Ken Lang, the CTO of Lycos was at UCI the other month well before
they were widely recognized as the fastest growing site on the net
and overtook Yahoo one month. He talked about their strategy
for grabbing customers. Their strategy was to buy highly visited
sites, not change them, but cross-link and cross-banner the hell out of each of
the sites. It seems that Time Warner should take the same successful
approach to Money, Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, People, Teen People, Life,
MutualFunds, and Entertainment Weekly. That's too bad Pathfinder couldn't
make a deal with Lycos and provide a weekly magazine portal. I don't
personally buy into the 'content is king' theory of eyeball mining, but
it seems all the pieces are there. Make it a semi-weekly updated site
with each magazine promoting one or two of its top stories, automatically
lifted and formated to the pathfinder site. It's a shame they are
retiring a site with so many hits. Heck, they could run the whole thing
with a Vignette server and one Webmaster with a laptop and a cell/pager.
Greg